Adaptive tracking of representative cycles in regular and zigzag persistent homology

Abstract: Persistent homology and zigzag persistent homology are techniques which track the homology over a sequence of spaces, outputting a set of intervals corresponding to birth and death times of homological features in the sequence. This paper presents a method for choosing a homology class to correspond to each of the intervals at each time point. For each homology class a specific representative cycle is stored, with the choice of homology class and representative cycle being both geometrically relevant and compatible with the birth-death interval decomposition. After describing the method in detail and proving its correctness, we illustrate the utility of the method by applying it to the study of coverage holes in time-varying sensor networks.